Managing large projects involving different groups of people and complex tasks can be challenging. The solution is to use project management software, which allows a more efficient management of projects.

Project management and collaboration skills play a major role in every business and often the outcome of a project is highly affected by the initial planning and monitoring stages of a project.

Project management is especially important for small and flexible businesses where all the work is based on a few people who have to communicate and develop the workflow.

Web-based project management and collaboration tools are the top choice of hundreds of entrepreneurs and thousands of small and medium size businesses. Project management software is not just for managing software based project. These tools will maximize your productivity, organization, and help you keep on top of your projects effortlessly. Keep track of your projects, manage your workers, set milestones, schedule your work, upload your files, send invoices, sync with your mobile – all of these features and more make these apps almost necessary.

A web-based project management software can be accessed through an intranet or WAN / LAN using a web browser.Our company policy is to use project management software for all our projects (small or large). Obviously The following open source softwares are used by some of the biggest research organizations and companies world wild. For example, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory uses track software or open source project such as lighttpd / phpbb use redmine software to keep track of their projects.

Check out our following top 5 free open source project management software.

Redmine is a flexible project management web application. It is written using Ruby on Rails framework and it is cross-platform and cross-database.

Redmine contains a lot of functionality geared heavily towards developers. It’s really powerful tool but may take some time to getting used to. It supports multiple projects, role-based access and permissions, Gantt charting and a calendar. Redmine also supports wiki and forums assigned on a project level to help centralize information and communication

Some of the main features of Redmine are:

Multiple projects support

Flexible role based access control

Flexible issue tracking system

Gantt chart and calendar

News, documents & files management

Feeds & email notifications

Per project wiki

Per project forums

Time tracking

Custom fields for issues, time-entries, projects and users

SCM integration (SVN, CVS, Git, Mercurial, Bazaar and Darcs)

Issue creation via email

Multiple LDAP authentication support

User self-registration support

Multilanguage support

Multiple databases support

Redmine is open source and released under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2 (GPL).

Codendi is an open-source collaborative development platform offered by Xerox. From only one interface, it gathers, all the needed tools for software development teams: management and versioning of code, bugs, requirements, documents, reporting, tests etc. It is mainly used for managing software project processes. It is based on open-source standards, Codendi is the collaborative platform for software project management proposed by Xerox.

At the origin, Codendi is a fork from Sourceforge.net. Codendi is based on an LAMP architecture (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) and offers and SOAP Web Services interface.

ProjectPier is a Free, Open-Source, self-hosted PHP application for managing tasks, projects and teams through an intuitive web interface. ProjectPier will help your organization communicate, collaborate and get things done Its function is similar to commercial groupware/project management products, but allows the freedom and scalability of self-hosting.

ProjectPier is a cross-platform application that is written using PHP, Javascript and requires a MySQL database backend. ProjectPier is freely available and licensed under the Gnu Affero General Public License (AGPL), which means you’re welcome to use and modify the software as long as any changes are distributed under the same license restrictions.

Open Atrium is an open source platform designed specifically to make great teams communicate better. An intranet in a box with: a blog, a wiki, a calendar, a to do list, a shoutbox, and a dashboard to manage it all. Let’s not forget that it’s also completely customizable.

Open Atrium is a part of a growing open source offering helping commercial companies, international organizations, federal governments, and online publishers grow their enterprise platforms with excellent team communications tools. Open Atrium is powered by an active community, and it’s working. Open Atrium is now being translated into more than twenty languages and several hundred people are growing its base of features.

Atrium’s theme is built using Bootstrap, a front-end framework using responsive CSS that allows content to be ready for multiple screen sizes, out of the box. Over two dozen cross-browser, responsive layouts and several responsive image styles are included to aid in site building and allow your site to work seamlessly on mobile devices.

PlanCake is a open source task management system. It allows you to export all your data but you can even download the entire PlanCake system and run it on your own server.

PlanCake is an Open-Source and GTD-Friendly Task Management Tool PlanCake has an inbox, a to-do list, and a calendar by default. You can create new lists to sort and separate contexts and projects. The calendar aggregates all your date-based to-do list items and has a great feature where you can suppress repetitive tasks so they will be shown only on the closest active day and not cluttering up your calendar view for future days and weeks.